Which Performance Counters are available in each Statistic Level?

When analysing performance metrics in the vSphere Web Client (Monitor > Performance) or in the vSphere Client (Performance Tab) you might have seen the following messages instead of performance graphs:

"No data available"

"Data is not collected for the current statistics level. Increase the statistics level to view the graph."

Statistic parameters are "Interval Duration" and "Statistics Level". This is what you configure in the vCenter Server settings:

Interval Duration determines the frequency at which statistics are stores:

Realtime (20 seconds), save for 1 hour - not configurable, all metrics available

5 minutes, save for X days

30 minutes, save for X weeks

2 hours, save for X month

1 day, save for X month

Statistic Level determines the amount of data gathered and which counters are available for displayed. The default Level 1 stores the fewest metrics, Level 4 stores all metrics supported by the vCenter Server.

With vSphere 6.0, vCenter Server supports 544 metrics but as there are only 4 statistic levels it is not clear what metrics are included in each level. This post helps to understand what metrics are included in each level, and how you can add single metrics to lower levels. This might be helpful if you need single metrics from level 2, but do not want to activate all level 2 metrics.

Please note that changing the collection level beyond level 1 or adding a large number of data counters to collection level 1, might result in a significant reduced performance.

The number in brackets is the "Per Device Statistic Level" which is typically only available in higher levels. Some metrics are available as aggregated metric and for each device, or object. A descriptive example are datastore metrics. They are available as aggregated metric for the entire host and for individual datastores:

Change collection level for metrics

Download and unzip LevelMappingUtility.zip (Also available in KB2009532 from VMware). The archive contains the required Power CLI functions in VMware.VimAutomation.PowerCliExtensions.CounterLevelMapping.psm1

3 Comments.

Thank you for this nice summary. Your bullet list titled Object Index has an incorrect hyperlink for the "Virtual Machine" item. It redirects to a table titled "Datastore performance counters". It seems that perhaps you did not add the table for Virtual Machine?

I came upon your post because I have a perl script that queries VMs for their CPU metrics. I have one vCenter that is 5.1 and a second vCenter which is 5.5. They are both set to Level 1 stats - YET - the script enumerates many more metrics from the 5.1 version of vCenter than the 5.5 version - which I cannot explain.

I am using Level mapping utility for vCenter Server Appliance 6 and in my home lab I brought all the counters to level 2 i.e. AggregateLevel and perdevicelevel however still few counters are not showing data